In this hilarious piece, Deepti Menon tells us of her two new year resolutions that she is resolute about making…the keeping of them is a whole different matter!

Tring, tring! The door bell rings and I freeze in my tracks, clad in my pajamas and my sleep-tousled hair. Who could it be at this unearthly hour? I am still getting used to living in Kerala, where people wake up at four in the morning, bathe, go to the temple and then decided to come a-visiting when I am still in heavenly slumber.

Therefore…

New Year Resolution Number 1

Having faced this scenario over the past year a number of times, out of sheer embarrassment, I have decided to change my timings. No more do I lounge around in the morning, relaxing over my hot cuppa, reading the newspaper and browsing over my Sudoku. Instead, I make a dash into the bathroom immediately after breakfast and come out, fresh as a daisy, in clothes that would not put a scarecrow to shame. (By which I mean not my husband’s discarded T-shirt and my own scraggly pajamas!)

Of course, the fact that I have begun to hop over to my mother’s school to lend her a hand has helped me to fast forward the hours in the morning. A cup of tea is followed by breakfast for self and spouse, (also daughter and frisky granddaughter, when they are around). Ms. Frisky has her own ideas of breakfast. Round dosas are a no-no, as far as she is concerned. So, there I stand, ladle in hand, trying to frame cats, flowers, hearts, umbrellas and apples out of dosamavu. There was a cat that startled me particularly, so lifelike did it look.

A two-minute shower later, and a heartbreaking farewell to my little Frisky, I make a dash down two flights of stairs to catch an auto and start off my day.

Resolution Number 2

The cleanliness gene lies dormant in all of us in our family; in my case, it stays as dormant as a dormouse till it senses the arrival of visitors. The next moment, it erupts like a volcano, taking over my entire persona, turning me into a gladiator of sorts as I rush into action, mowing down cobwebs and dust motes with equal energy, starting with the kitchen and moving on with perfect efficiency (or so I imagine!) till every corner is done. The rag gets dirtier as my energy flags, and my better half’s voice gets more strident as he tells me to slow down before I burst a blood vessel.

It has always come as a surprise to me how every nook has its very own spider, spinning webs as though it has nothing better to do. Do spiders have a daily routine in which they need to put up so many webs or suffer the consequences? And what about the cockroaches that fly out suddenly, and settle in your hair, almost causing you to burst the aforesaid blood vessel? Then there is the inevitable army of ants that plods on relentlessly, making its way painstakingly over the kitchen counter, and into every morsel of food that lies around. It is amazing to see these tiny ‘Houdinis’ make their way into airtight containers and jars of sweets.

The ideal way to clean up, of course, is to pick up everything visible in the room and stuff it into various cupboards, and hope against hope that no one decides unwittingly to open one of them. Once it so happened that an aunt of mine decided to visit a niece of hers (luckily, not me!). On an early morning ramble around the house, she needed something, (I forget what) and she opened the cupboard in her room only to find a whole pile of clothes, bed sheets, pillow covers and linen descending on her head. Her niece rushed in, aghast, only to find her ensconced under a pile of cloth.

So, resolution number 2 looms in the horizon, as shiny as the Christmas stars that adorn most houses in December. I will clean one little nook of the house every day, so that by the time the next set of visitors land up, I would have finished a number of gladiatorial rounds, leaving it squeaky clean all the time. No more rushing around like a banshee, or toiling like a slave, wishing that I had a Potter-like broom that would magically clean the entire house… the mother of all resolutions!

This, to me, constitutes the mother of all New Year resolutions!

PS: “A New Year’s resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other.”

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